[Jacquerie]

The seeming contradiction between recognition of an emerging tyranny and reluctance to do anything substantive about it resides deep in our psyche. Our Founders, Eric Hoffer, (The True Believer) and others have written at length of man's propensity to accept political discomforts rather than “abolish the Forms to which they are accustomed.”

Second, passions rather than reason typically direct our public affairs. Fear of the unknown prevents Article V opponents from equating a common congressman who proposes an amendment with a state delegate in convention who also proposes an amendment.

Most Article V opponents assume that state delegates to an amendments convention will perform their duties in the same reprehensible manner we know so well from the Uniparty denizens in Washington, DC. Since most congressmen and senators would sell their souls today for reelection tomorrow, opponents expect states to send hacks with no interest beyond their own to an Article V convention. An erroneous equivalence is made between the familiar, and that which we have never seen.

If there is an institution analogous to an amendments convention, it is the Electoral College. We have never had a ‘runaway’ electoral college because electors are statutorily responsible to their states. For the very same reason there is no reason to fear a runaway amendments convention.

Finally, there are some prominent conservative opponents to Article V. It is natural to respect the opinions of those we respect.

Perhaps conservative opponents will put aside their anti-Article V passion when their local imam sentences them to fifty lashes for blaspheming islam . . . but by then of course it will be too late.

[aragorn]

BFL - too much interesting commentary, and I have to leave now...

[lentulusgracchus]

Most Article V opponents assume that state delegates to an amendments convention will perform their duties in the same reprehensible manner we know so well from the Uniparty denizens in Washington, DC.

In fact, for a long time in the 19th and 20th centuries, state legislatures did just that. That sort of behavior even found its way into the U.S. Supreme Court, when the Court met to consider a California case in which a mere county had made bold to lay a tax on a property of the mighty Central Pacific Railroad in the heyday of the Big Four (Leland Stanford, C.P. Huntington, and the rest).

We got far worse than what CPRR wanted from the case: We got, by the intermeddling of a corrupt Associate Justice (the CJ being then on his deathbed), the personhood of the corporation -- a topic never touched by the Court, or the Congress, or by anyone this side of God -- rolled into the epitome of the case, and nowhere to be found in the opinion itself. Now, that is epic corruption!

And yet that sort of thinking was common then. "We'll just fix this."